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I installed Linux Mint on a USB drive, about a month ago. I installed several applications, including Double commander and some text-based browsers. They all worked fine.

But when I reboot, all of the installed applications are gone.

Last night, I tried installing just one application, Double Commander. Then, I created backup folder within Home, and copied the lib\DoubleCommmander folder to there. I confirmed that both folders existed, and they had content.

But when I rebooted, Double Commander was gone. And the folders, in both lib and home, were gone.

What did I do wrong?

If I have to re-generate Linux Mint on the flash drive, that would be ok, if it's the simplest way to resolve this. Since nothing persisted, there's nothing on the flash drive that's valuable.

No go, so far. For whatever reason, they made French the default language for MultiSystem.

So after installing it on another bootable USB with MultiSystem and running that, everything comes up in French. I can change the language of the MultiSystem utility to English easily enough, it's right there in the GUI. So I can get as far as inserting the USB that will contain Linux Mint, and confirming with the MultiSystem utility.

But I can't get anywhere after that. Everything is labeled in French, except for the terminal. When I try to change the system language using instructions on the web, there's various error or status messages. But since they are in French, I don't know what they mean.

It seems like too much of a hassle to type the error messages into Google Translate on another computer or tablet, and show them in English.

So what I'll do, is purchase some 4 gig flash drives from Staples tomorrow, and install Linux Mint on those. If I understand correctly, these should be writable, since they don't pass the 4 GB limit.

Maybe that will be enough, to play with. If not, then maybe I'll install MultiSystem on that USB Linux Mint, and use that to install it on my original 128 GB drive.

linuxwhatthe wrote:No go, so far. For whatever reason, they made French the default language for MultiSystem.

So after installing it on another bootable USB with MultiSystem and running that, everything comes up in French. I can change the language of the MultiSystem utility to English easily enough, it's right there in the GUI. So I can get as far as inserting the USB that will contain Linux Mint, and confirming with the MultiSystem utility.

But I can't get anywhere after that. Everything is labeled in French, except for the terminal. When I try to change the system language using instructions on the web, there's various error or status messages. But since they are in French, I don't know what they mean.

That's puzzling. I assume you're changing language with the drop-down on the splash page. That worked fine for me.

Another option, if your host system uses Windows, is the Universal USB Installer, available from Pendrive Linux. Another, which works in both Windows and Linux, is MultiBootUSB. Both produce only conventional persistent drives (limited to 4 GB), but that's good enough for testing purposes. For that matter, it's much easier to create a conventional persistent drive with MultiSystem than the >4 GB method described in the tutorial.

There are other options, but those three are the ones I've found to be most reliable. UUI is easiest, MBU can do persistence for multiple ISOs on one flash drive, and MS can be tweaked to produce a >4 GB drive (albeit only one ISO). Choose based on which strength best suits your needs.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Running Mate 18.3 64 bit (by upgrade from 18.1-2)

I have been running Linux Mint Mate from a Persistent, 32Gb Sandisk Ultra USB 3.0 drive since July without any major problems.
I used UUI to create it. The secret with it to get a persistent drive over the default 4Gb maximum is to first format it as an NTFS drive. If you use the UUI default, it is formatted as FAT32, which has a maximum size limit of 4Gb for persistence.

It will take a very long time to create this persistent drive. I believe it was 1-2 hours, if my memory serves me correctly. The option to use more than 4Gbs persistence only shows up if you pre-format the drive as NTFS. I did this in the standard window drive formatting tool, before i launced UUI.

One very important note, when selecting the maximum size that you want the persistent drive in UUI, is to allow enough free space for the Linux ISO file to be copied by UUI to the drive or the drive will not boot, as the ISO will not be copied to the USB drive.
UUI will give you no warning that the copy failed when the free space is inadequate. That happened on my first attempt.
You can view the USB drive to see if the copy process happened, in which case you will see the Linux.ISO file on the drive.

In my case, the linuxmint-18.1-mate-64bit.iso is ~1.9Gbs and when I view the current isodevice folder in my current file system, it is ~2.5Gbs in size. my casper-rw drive shows as 26.2Gbs.
I may have had more room to make it larger than the 26.2, on the 32GB drive, but I was playing it safe the second time trying to create it,because, as I stated previously creation takes a very, very long time.

Updates work fine and I am now on the latest 18.3, but the drive still boots from the 18.1 ISO.
To actually boot from a newer ISO and update the kernel etc, one would need to create it again. I have not encountered any issues running both 18.2 and now 18.3 with the 18.1 boot ISO. I udate it with the built in Update Manager.

The only issue I really have is running out of free space on the drive. I would therefore recommend using a 64Gb or 128Gb drive to start out with. My guess i though,is that the creation time will be multiplied?

I use this a my daily driver now and only boot back into Windows 7 when I need to. I eventually plan on installing on a real hard drive or SSD, in the future.
I am typing from it now.
Finally, make sure you use a reasonably fast USB thumb drive. My computer is old and only has USB 2.0 ports, But I am using the Sandisk Ultra 3.0 drive, which I believe has faster memory in it. You can, of course purchase much faster drives, which cost more.

UPDATE: one thing I forot to point out is that theoretically, if you use NTFS on a USB stick vs FAT32 the drive will fail sooner because of the constant writes to the file system.

Hopefully someone with more knowledge than me can either confirm or deny this. This was something I had read many years ago when USB thumb drives weren't as reliable as they are today.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that I am doing this on a ~2009, legacy bios system.
This may or may not work on modern UEFI bios system unless your UEFI bios also has an options in it's setup for legacy bios mode. I do know Linux Mint supports UEFI, but I'm not sure if UEFI booting is supported by it for NTFS drives. Maybe someone more knowledgeable will answer that, also.
This link may be of use:

FWIW, I think one is much better off doing full install to USB for long term use. Relatively easy to do in BIOS/legacy boot. A little tricky in UEFI, but this method works well for me. Best done with an external hard drive (SSD or conventional), as they're engineered for this sort of thing, but flash drives also will work.* IMHO, persistent drives are mostly suitable for testing. Their other handy feature is portability, as they'll run on a wider range of hardware, but that's an argument for having one in addition to rather than instead of a full install USB.

* Performance of a 2.0 flash drive, though, is intolerably slow. Curiously, a 3.0 flash on a 2.0 port performs okay, as does a 2.0 hard drive.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Running Mate 18.3 64 bit (by upgrade from 18.1-2)

Finally, I checked off and set everything needed, rebooted on another laptop, installed some programs, and rebooted to see if they were still there. Yes!

When booting, there's always 2 choices of 18.3 cinnamon regular and acpi=off. I select the first one.

There are a few error messages while booting up, about not mounting certain files, and the NTFS partition being unstable. They scroll by too fast, but I'll record them and search on the web, during the next week.

admin/pbear/marty, thanks for your assistance. I now have a workable 18.3 Linux system on a USB drive, ready for fun and games and learning.